In
analysing Nietzsche’s philosophy, Deleuze reinserted
that, “morality has replaced religion as a dogma and
that science is increasingly replacing morality.”[1]
Is there any connection between these affirmations and
the word of Nietzsche: “God is dead?” In a sense I think
it is. Of course Nietzsche’s philosophy presents a very
complex mechanism, which is intended to dismantle, what
was dominant and determinant in the European history for
so long, namely, the Christian doctrine. The
Judeo-Christian tradition was formed as a very
complicate process in which many elements must be
considered. After becoming official, in the Roman
Empire, in 313 A.D., Christianity transformed itself
under the political pressure, exercised on it, by the
leadership of the Roman state and mainly by the Roman
emperor Constantine. From a morality, emphasizing peace
more than anything else, Christianity was transformed in
a politico-religious ideology, able to be an adequate
instrument for the ruling of millions of peoples.

In
order to attend to this goal God was elevated to an
unreachable level, almost completely separated from the
world. Beyond any possibility of understanding Him, God
was placed under the protection of an ideal realm
heavily guarded by the concepts of Greek philosophy. His
representatives became His loudspeakers and none else
was even able to have a glimpse of Him. In a very subtle
way the old philosophy of Greece was discovered as a
conceptual tool, in order to explain and understand God.
It was the same philosophy, which rejected the
possibility of such a God when Apostle Paul presented
the Christianity to Greeks. Platonism looked as the
most suitable conception to represent a deity outside
the world, who direct and control humanity. The only
difficulty, which was created, was the fact that such a
philosophy couldn’t really assimilate the spirit of
Christianity, one which presupposes a personal
involvement between God and human beings.

Nietzsche was a philosopher who understood very well the
philosophical failure of Christianity and he criticized
the roots of such a situation. The separation between
the ideal realm of God and the reality of the world with
the imposition of the former over the latter was one of
the main causes of the misrepresenting of God. For Plato
the world of Ideas was the real one, the truth,
unchangeable, idealized reality and the instable
sensible world was only a domain of shadows, of
appearances. Transposed and subordinated by
Christianity, through the philosophy of neo-Platonists
and Fathers of the Church this Platonist pattern suited
perfectly to the need of rationality, which summoned the
Church. The question is: why this acute need for
rationality? Faith was supposed to sustain itself
through the power of God and miracles and not through
the force of the metaphysical argumentation. It is
probable that a certain apostasy in the Church made
impossible the spread of the Christian faith only
through its own means and also, as an ideology, the
Christianity needed rational arguments to fight its
battles. I suppose that from the beginning the
theoretical side of Christianity was coined with a view
of being able to counterbalance any ideological
opposition to it and to dominate the earthly world.

Nietzsche aptly saw this kind of determination and went
to its roots, until its metaphysical origins. As a
matter of fact Nietzsche was mainly preoccupied of
philosophy and of the dissolution of values, a movement,
which was named nihilism. He didn’t really criticize
Christianity as a possibility of a miraculous path
towards the universe but he negated the philosophical
fundament of it, casting doubts about its rational
support. “God is dead” is a philosophical concept and
doesn’t question the possibility of the existence of
God, as a reality, but the metaphysical description of
such a possibility. Not been proven by philosophy, the
reality of God is denied, by a countermovement, which
proposes itself to overturn the history of metaphysics,
which sustains and imposes to the modern thinking this
possibility. Trying to sustain the idea of the existence
of God is one thing but imposing the certitude of that
existence through metaphysics was another. Nietzsche
reaction was a normal one and he refuted the
philosophical basis for the existence of God, but from
within the metaphysical tradition itself. At this point
Heidegger is showing that unless the question of Being
of beings is well understood and not obstructed, as it
was, by the history of metaphysics, the real essence of
man can’t be grasped. Even if there is not so much place
for God, in Heidegger’s philosophy, on the other side he
opened a line of questioning, which can be very useful
for someone who wants to reignite the problem of God in
philosophy. I am saying all this only to show that the
problematic put in question by the word of Nietzsche
“God is dead” remains in actuality and that the solution
given by Heidegger to the history of metaphysics is very
important in order to open new directions in philosophy.

As
Deleuse quoted, reaffirming the Nietzsche ideas:
“Christianity as dogma has been ruined by its own
morality” and this is a phrase from the “Genealogy of
Morals.” The understanding of religion today is not the
same as in the past. “What has triumphed of the
Christian God is Christian morality itself” or “the
instinct for truth in the end forbids itself the lie of
faith in God” are rhetorical formulas with no much power
of persuasion in them. As far as we can see, the
Christian morality is more affected by the laicisation
of society than the hope in the existence of a God. On
the other side for Nietzsche the “instinct for truth” is
not a determination for truth for its own sake but only
an adjuvant of the Will to Power. But Nietzsche didn’t
go so far as to speculate that the thirst for power,
present also in man and intrinsic to the Will to Power
can go up even to envy and will, for man, a power
similar to God’s. Nevertheless, in Nietzsche’s framework
of thinking man can’t take the place of God and
Heidegger made that clear.

As
Deleuse remember us through Nietzsche thoughts:
“Morality is the continuation of religion but by other
means; knowledge is the continuation of morality and
religion but by other means.” The reactive forces,
referring to the ascetical ideal that competes with each
other are changing. In this way they determine a
modification of meaning of the ideal itself. Critique is
not to be confused with the manifestation of this
competition. In the same time Nietzsche adds that
“morality also must be on the road to ruin.” For that
happening Nietzsche requires a change of ideal,
something else, different from the ascetic ideal, “a
different way of felling.” But any ideal requires
morality and in turn this calls for virtue, which in its
turn asks for truth. As Deleuse said “Virtue answers for
religion, truth for virtue,” consequently “critique must
be a critique of truth itself.”[2]
Christianity had to drop many of its assertions and the
“most striking inference” about itself is put in
discussion when the right question is formulated: “What
is the meaning of all will to truth?” It is an
interrogation not avoided by Nietzsche. As Deleuze put
it “what meaning would our whole being possess if it
where not this, that in us the will to truth becomes
conscious of itself as a problem?” Because the will to
truth gains self consciousness – morality will gradually
perish now. For Nietzsche, the ascetic ideal no longer
has any hiding place beyond the will to truth, no longer
has anyone to answer for it.[3]
This is the moment of feeling differently, of changing
ideals. Calling the will to truth into question is a
solution to prevent the ascetic ideal to continue it in
other forms. But we don’t replace the ascetic ideal, we
want to destroy the place, we want another ideal in
another place, another way of knowing, another concept
of truth, one which presupposes a completely different
will.[4]
Deleuse summarised very expressively the radicalism of
Nietzsche’s approach in philosophy and its intention of
shaking the whole establishment of the history of
metaphysics when promoting the formula: “God is dead.”

Absolute Spirit, for Hegel, that is the Being of
beings, represent in the same time the Absolute Will.
This was for Hegel the implicit necessity by reason of
which the Absolute grasps into itself the complete
seizure of itself. Schopenhauer stood between Hegel and
Nietzsche. It is obvious that Nietzsche is indebt for
the concept of Will to Power to Schopenhauer. Based on
Leibniz expanded notion of subject, which embraced not
only the human ego but all beings, insofar as they are
dynamic, Being was conceived in the modern thought as
the dynamism of dynamic beings. This type of movement
came to be represented as Will. Nietzsche understood
Being as a universal Becoming and express it as Will. In
the same time the Will must not be understood in pure
psychological terms because it is not such a thing but
rather it is a mastery over what is wiled. It is a
commanding, which implies a knowledgeable power of
disposition over the possibilities of any given action
to be performed.

When
commanding, one who commands accedes to his own power of
disposition and in this way obeys himself. First of all
to command is a mastery of him or herself, it is a self
conquest. By letting one’s own disposing power be
itself, the will wills its own wiling. It is a
will-unto-wiling and for this reason passes beyond
itself.
[5]
Brings itself under its own control but doesn’t stop to
that but wills to become stronger and more itself in
further willing. The level of achievement already
attained is the basis for further achievements. In the
process of growth the moment of overcoming the relative
rest preserves a verifiable constant of the whole
movement. The relative rest and the overcoming of this
moment are both necessary for the living process. They
are conditions imposed by Will itself. The moment of
consolidation come to pass when Will master itself and
thus submits to itself. In its dynamic toward becoming
stronger the Will moves toward more and more power. This
movement passes from moments of own mastery, when Will
submits to itself, moments of constancy, toward
overpowering of itself.
[6]
The word “Power” means the manner by which the Will
wills itself. These correlative conditions are posed by
the nature of the Will.

In any
case Will-unto-Power must not to be associated with a
type of psychological or anthropological interpretation.
This kind of Will is not the want or desire of
subjectivity to exercise the extent of its domination.
Will-unto-Power is the “word of Being.” In fact
Nietzsche engages in a destruction of the traditional
psychological-metaphysical conception of Will in the
Western culture. In the classical representation the
Will is understood as a faculty of subjectivity. It is
seen as the necessary cause of all possible action.
Nietzsche starts his analyse regarding the
Will-unto-Power with the strange assessment that there
is not Will. Why? Firstly, because Will is never for
Nietzsche a central focal point from which can be
derived the possibility of a concrete comportment. Will
is plural and complex and is never generated by a first
primary cause. There is neither a centre nor an origin
and will refuses any pretensions of identification.
There are a plurality and multiplicity of phenomena but
not a real substantiality backing the will. The
identification of will is just a figurative composition
of a diversity of elements. What is called will is an
impossible compound of sentiment and affect and it is
always characterized post factum. For Nietzsche will is
just a secondary product of an internal chain of events
or phenomena, which precedes it. What we call will is
the result of a struggle between competing forces and
the triumph of one over the others. There is not a
common denominator under which one can subsume the
multiplicity of wills.

For
Nietzsche the problem of Man is that he is unable to
really separate the causes from the effects and
confounds the sickness with the symptoms. The real
philosophy is from the body the place where emotions and
affects express themselves, creating powerful movements,
which can’t be systematized and conceptualized as such,
because escape to a rational investigation, but
generates the inner core of a multiplicity and
proliferation of differentiations. Is it a new
foundation for rationality or a negation of it or it is
a new direction to look for something, which was not yet
been thought? The history of philosophy kept
unthought-of the inner dynamic of the body, the basics
levels of the movements of the “wills” and the way in
which will emerges. It should be said that
Will-unto-Power doesn’t restrict to the domain of
unconscious or the body but imply all forces including
the ones of the world. The expression Will-unto-Power
applies to the entire domain of forces and their
orientation. Will-unto-Power is the name for the
tensions or polarities which structure and determine
forces. The play of diversity creates a continued
multiplication of instable perspectives, a struggle of
different directions, which fight between each other to
get access and dominance. The complexity of Nietzsche’s
understanding of Will-unto-Power doesn’t allow reducing
the force to a singular one, which diversifies itself.
Nietzsche attributes to force an interior will, an
unaccomplished and never ending movement of the
deployment of force. What is Power? It is a permanent
increase, surplus of power towards which will is
willing. This is a law of Force or of Will. This is an
internal command, to be continuously in an increase of
itself. There are nevertheless different directions such
as: to augment itself, to surpass itself or to
degenerate itself. There is an acting force and a
reacting force, the ascending life or the decadent life.
The dynamic of Will being the same, the direction can be
changed towards decadence, the will, willingly, refuses
the “movement of life.” It is a progress, an increase,
which Nietzsche sees it as will towards nothingness.

Will-unto-Power presents itself to itself as a chaotic
and in the same time contradictory diversity of
elementary compulsions. The possibilities present
themselves as a continuous excess or supplementary of a
primitive affectivity. In this internal “Chaos,” which
is not at all a disorder that can be judged in relation
to some possible order, but a proliferation of forces,
Will-unto-Power appears in the same time as a principle
of this forces and an extension of their possibility.
Nietzsche said: “The powerful man is the one who desires
to see the Chaos.” That means to confront the internal
complexity of its own affectivity and to “master” that
which in itself can’t be “mastered” in its continuous
proliferation. To master doesn’t mean to control but to
express “in style.” The weak will is the one which looks
for a solution for the Chaos, to enclose the life in a
conceptual order, which seems like a safeguard for the
mind but is a prison for Life. The dynamic of Life is
uncontrollable by the structures of the rationality and
when such an imposed construction is forced upon it,
Life react by trying to overthrow an overwhelming
conceptuality. To master doesn’t mean the dictatorship
of the conceptuality over Life but to face, to
understand and to open to a new space where the forces
need to supplement themselves in an incessant manner.
The meaning of powerful is to assume the variety of
difference and plurality and weak is the ongoing search
for protection sometimes thought in the fictional realm
of an ideal.

The
Being of beings is conceived as a process of Becoming,
Life force, Will, within which certain complex
structures form. What is a value and in what sense it is
an aspect of all this? An aspect is that, which is seen
by a seeing. In the case of value, what precisely is
seen and who is it that sees? Heidegger gave an answer
in Nietzsche’s name to that questioning. What is seen
are the conditions of universal Will. The one which sees
is the Will-unto-Power itself. It is as if universal
Will, which is the Being of the beings, is also a
process of Self-awareness, which sees itself in its
evolution. Consciousness belongs to Will. This seeing by
which Will sees itself as itself, that is Life in
growth, is the seeing which poses the necessary
conditions of itself. What is seen and posed is “value.”
The possession of values is in fact the attribute of
Will-unto-Power and they are the self-posed conditions
of its own unfolding. According to its very essence, the
Will-unto-Power is a value posing Will. As the Being of
beings, Will is the ground of all value and as such
philosophy becomes a philosophy of values. The two
fundamental values in the Nietzsche’s system are truth
and art. In a further chapter I will analyze what truth
means for Nietzsche and for Heidegger.
[7]

The
second determining principle for Nietzsche is “the
eternal return of the selfsame.” Nietzsche tries to
overcome the negative nihilism figuring out how man may
pass from his present condition to a new comprehension
of Being and as such to a superior condition. Nietzsche
makes the difference between the man as he was until
now, the last man and man as he should be, the
“superior,” or “super-“ man. The reason why the “modern
man” is lost in a value-less nihilism is that he has not
really entered into himself. Failing to do that, he
cannot understand and appreciate correctly his own
nature and consequently cannot assume it. The super-man
has comprehended himself and accepted his real nature,
in terms of the Will-unto-Power and consequently he has
a new relation to Being. The super-man brings the
essence of man into the truth and freely assumes that
truth. A certain correspondence can be made between this
principle and the Heidegger’s idea of the difference
between the inauthentic and the authentic man. Heidegger
defined Nietzsche’s problem in the following terms: how
can man overcome his fallen condition and achieve
authenticity and this in the context of Will-unto-Power?
The answer is found in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” in which
the hero is super-man in the state of becoming. He
questions himself in order to know if his will
corresponds to the Will-unto-Power, which dominates the
totality of beings.
[8]
Seen in this way the function of super-man is a
responding to Will-unto-Power as the Being of beings.
The modern man is characterized by a spirit of vengeance
triggered by the nihilism of values. Freedom from this
spirit is the effigy of super-man. The achieving of
authenticity is precisely this kind of liberation.

Man is
for Nietzsche a rational animal and that is along the
lines of metaphysical tradition. The man was conceived
as a complex compound of a “sensible,” animal element
and the rational element “supra-sensible,” which
characterizes his being. The sensible can be named also
“physical,” and the supra-sensible metaphysical. In man
the passage from physical to metaphysical is realized.
For Nietzsche man is a metaphysical being but doesn’t
learn to appreciate fully this fact. The present-ational
side of beings is the one which count for the human
rational, which makes present for himself the beings
through diverse mental operations. Surely the “spirit of
vengeance” must not be understood as “retaliation” but
rather as “persecution.” As Heidegger pose it, for
Nietzsche, the modern man “do violence” to beings, which
he pro-poses, in the sense that he submits them to his
own control, decom-poses them by his analysis, and dis-poses
of them, in a arbitrary way. The original pro-posing has
become distorted, by the persecution of beings. This is
how Nietzsche understands the “spirit of vengeance” and
from this the modern man has to be set free if the aim
is to overcome nihilism. Only when man understands the
full importance of Being as Will-unto-Power he can see
that the “spirit of vengeance” is completely stranger to
it because this is foreign to Will as Will. It is
improper to universal Will that anything resist it in
any way. The willing implies domination on what is
willed. Will is subdued only to itself and that is
customary when Will overcomes the conditions of its own
unfolding. The Will is in a relation with itself that is
wills itself and nothing outside this dynamic is
supposed to resist.

The way
to authenticity is the man response to the universal
Will as the “eternal return of the selfsame.” Firstly
one has to have a look on Nietzsche’s understanding of
time. It must be said that Nietzsche’s conception of
time is inherited from and doesn’t overcome the history
of metaphysics. Like everyone before him, starting with
Aristotle, Nietzsche understands time as a series of
“now” in their succession. The not-yet-“now”, which is
the future, passes by the present “now” in order to
become immediately a no-longer-“now,” which is the past.
Nietzsche sees a sort of resistance of the past to
universal Will, because the latter is always facing
forward toward more Willing. Nietzsche conceives pure
Willing in the sense that the past is dissolved in a
“now” that remains. Time is purified of that which makes
it “merely temporal.” In a certain manner time for
Nietzsche becomes eternalized. There is a movement,
circle fashion, which can be designated as return, and a
consolidation, which can be refer to as “eternal.” The
triumph of metaphysics is that: “…Will eternally wills
the eternity of willing. ...”
[9]
In order to become a super-man, man has to comprehend
and accept the Will as the “eternal return.”

There
is a very strong connection between Nietzsche’s
understanding of the link between the Being of beings
and the nature of man as promoted in Zarathustra and the
dynamic which takes shape in the Dasein in Heidegger’s
Being and Time. There are also important differences due
to Nietzsche’s metaphysical limitations. Nietzsche
doesn’t do the correlation between Being and the nature
of man as such. The essence of the relationship between
the human nature and Being as the relation of this
essence to Being and the origin of this essence was not
thought. Heidegger went beyond metaphysics by passing
from present-ative thinking to foundational thought.
[10]
Heidegger noticed that Nietzsche’s philosophy remains
oblivious to the Being-process itself.

A
little more should be said about nihilism and Nietzsche.
The word nihilism designates a situation in which the
supreme or absolute values are brought down and labelled
as nullity with reference to their validity. The word
nihilism applies also to development of the European
metaphysical tradition since Plato. For Hegel history is
seen as the deployment of man to its supreme and
absolute state of perfection and eternity. For Nietzsche
this kind of perfection is in fact a movement in which
decadence reveals itself. For Nietzsche nihilism is
always present in the history of humankind and not less
in the actuality. Nihilism is not a conception or a way
to criticize reality but a state of being, which is
normal for humanity. Nihilism can’t be cured but only
surpassed. It is an emptiness of all significations so
much so that all meaning if it were to get any sense it
is only from non-meaning. Nietzsche noted a full
tiredness of the Western civilization, exhaustion, out
of this lack of meaning, which generates a disgust of
man for man. All has an equal non-value: evil, good,
truth, falsity. Only because nihilism is complete
disorientation can reverse it and become sudden
liberation. Coming to the point of identifying this
nihilism, where man finds comfort in the emptiness of
meaning, he opens in this actuality an in-actuality of
joy. The “Last Man” is the one who grasps the
signification of nihilism even if the mankind is still
unaware of this signification. The “Last man” is the one
who grasps the “meaning” of the death of God.

Among
all other values the destruction of the religious values
is the most acute ruining of all ideals because it is a
wrecking of the intelligibility, of all idea. The death
of God means the disappearance of the domination of
concepts and fixed intellectual structures upon the
sensible, imperfect, changeable world. The death of God
is the failure of all philosophical tradition based on
Plato’s philosophy and it should be emphasized that in
truth the Christian tradition was based on that way of
understanding. The matter of fact is that the God of
philosophers is mainly the God of Plato in the way that
was filtrated and adapted by a long tradition of
theology.

On the
other side I maintain that God is dead only within the
restricted limits of Nietzsche’s metaphysics and but
this doesn’t mean that, with it, all thinking about the
possibility of God are exhausted. The inadequacy of this
way of thinking, noted by Nietzsche, doesn’t guaranty
the impossibility of any other way of thinking about
God. I could agree with Nietzsche that the manner in
which the Greek philosophical tradition was adopted by
theologians, in a sense attempted to the life of God,
because suffocated a more dynamic way of understanding,
placing God above Life and even beyond existence, in a
realm of impossibility. This uniformity, this linearity
and rigidity, which situated God at the exclusive level
of rationality, the logos which is in language, is a
misplacing of the divinity who don’t forget to remember
humankind about love, which is an all encompassing way
of understanding life. It is true that the choice
between love and hatred is made at a rational level and
in a sense the complexity of the earthly life can’t be
reduced to the unilateralism of just one direction, but
love itself can be seen as a continuous need for
increasing a certain presence in the world a
supplementation or excess which explains a internal
dynamism. As far as God is love he is not dead because
love is a force of attraction, which explains everything
through its movement. The ideas can be overcome or
exceed by life, but love is life and God is love. The
Christianity teaches that “the letter (the rigidity of
the concepts or ideas) kills but the Spirit gives life.”
The discontent and the emptiness of values are explained
by the oversimplification of God who is not just an idea
or a concept or even a representative of a
supra-sensible world, created by man, but has a life of
his own independent of human creation. God is not a
human creation that goes together with the history of
metaphysics but a reality which have to be understood in
its own right. In fact Nietzsche is correct in saying
that when transforming God in the representative of a
way of thinking, or of the history of metaphysics, his
death intervene in the same time with the failure of
that way of philosophizing. God of the philosophers is
not necessarily the one of the faith and is true that,
in a sense, God has not been understood and remains
hidden in the history of metaphysics. Can He not be
understood by a classic metaphysical way of thinking,
which is not proper to that purpose, or we have to think
a whole new way of understanding God rationally, which
doesn’t exclude entirely metaphysics?

As a
thought exercise, it can be asked, not entirely outside
of Nietzsche’s framework of thinking: can God be
conceived as something interior to Life and not exterior
to it? The answer would be negative, if given by
Nietzsche, but a positive answer can be imagined as a
possibility. The place of God has to be in the
interiority of Life if it were to be somewhere at all,
because the Christianity teaches that God is eternal
life. It is true that the dynamic of the God’s life it
is not at all understood in the history of metaphysics
and He is conceived as an unmovable, unchangeable
reality which looks rather dead then alive and that,
because life is continuous movement. It is entirely
correct, by Nietzsche, to see Life as a permanent
dynamic and that is opposed to the lack of dynamic
attributed to God by the philosophers. “What changes
can’t be God because what changes is not the perfect
actuality but has still unfulfilled potentialities,
consequently it is not the embodiment of perfection,”
they say, but this assertion is far from the reality of
God, in my opinion. This is a possibility open up in
Nietzsche’s thinking but unthought-of by him. In fact
what I saw in Nietzsche and Heidegger, as unthought-of
by them is the opening of a new place for God, a space
from which God can be rediscovered as something who find
its place in an unceasing displacement of any attempt to
displace him.

To come
back to Nietzsche’s view about the death of God, for
him, it is the disappearance of all given identities and
with them the idea about the sovereignty of reason, that
means that of subjectivity. For Nietzsche, all returns
to Chaos, this is to Life, a movement, that can’t be
explained dialectically and doesn’t have a determined
end. What is negated in nihilism is Life itself through
a retraction of the Will-unto-Power from its proper
affirmation. It is not only our internal biological
complexity but also the movement of the world as
plurality and contradiction, which nihilism discovers as
a movement which tries to reduce everything to the
abstract schema of rationality. It is the domination of
the “idea” on reality, the true process of deadening the
free movement of Life. It is not that Life can’t be
transposed in thought or ideas, or it is irrational, but
it is about the imposition of given thoughts or undue
rational mechanisms, which paralyzes the free dynamic of
the Will-unto-Power and creates false values. The world
reveals and deploys many attributes that in fact Life
doesn’t possess: unity, identity happiness, truth. This
kind of imposition of rationality over the reality
started with Plato. In the history of metaphysics
manifests itself a negation of Life, a depreciation of
the sensible world, which is considered secondary to the
Ideas. Nevertheless this kind of negation it is not
declared and it is not evident.

For
Nietzsche, the history of metaphysics is that of
producing of what it is not. It is about values, which
doesn’t represent anything real, in fact non-values,
such as truth, good, beauty, causality, etc. It is a
movement, which doesn’t reveal itself as a foundation
and in which nihilism reveals itself as that which it is
not. Nihilism is equal to the historical deployment of
metaphysics in the sense that is a presentation of that
which it is not. It is a nugatory force of that which is
produced positively. Metaphysics reveals itself in
Nihilism in that which hides, intrinsic of its history.
The essence of nihilism can be separated in two
structures 1) nihilism that shows the real nature of
ideas, 2) nihilism, which sees the history of
metaphysics as an invention of signification, concepts
and ideas. The latter is the complete nihilism.
Heidegger speaking of the “visions of the world” refers
to the epochs of the history of metaphysics, which are
in the same time different levels of nihilism. For him
this nihilism is the product of the negation of what
remains unthought-of in the history of metaphysics that
is the question of Being. It was not only unthought-of
but also negated by what it was thought in the sense
that by not thinking of it was necessarily
misinterpreted by what was thought.

About
the “different levels of nihilism” it should be said
that it means a progressive discovery of the negation,
which is proper to it. That is due to internal
decomposition of “values.” It is an incessant
replacement of some fictions with others. For Nietzsche,
History is a continuous change of appearances, which are
based on no-thing that is on that which is different
that it appears. History it is not at all a progressive
movement based on the accumulation of rationalistic
values but a decomposition of what was from the
beginning a fiction. “The last remnants of God on Earth”
is the “super-man” who “annihilates” the false hope of
what is fictitious. In its achievement nihilism is both
and in the same times the revelation of the history of
metaphysics as nihilism and the opening of the question
of Being.

The
Will-unto-Power determines a self liberation of itself
towards a space where the humanity will not be dominated
by its false ideals. It is a place where the freedom of
the deployment of the plurality of forces it is
unbridled by any schematic desiderates. This kind of
dynamic is against any understanding which presupposes a
predetermined end. The word “God is dead” before to be
used by Nietzsche was coined by Hegel in its
Phenomenology of Spirit in Chapter VI, Revealed
religion. For Hegel the death of God means the death of
the abstraction of the concept of God, the death of God
as an external and transcendental manifestation, which
is negated by the dynamic of the birth of the Son of
God, who is internal to the human actuality. For Hegel
God becoming human marks the moment of death. It is the
death of a mode of God not of any possibility of him.
For Nietzsche the death of God is contained in the
process of thinking itself, it is a part of this
movement, which is an impossibility of expressing
something which is not thought-of. God is the embodiment
of a fiction and it is too much to say that “God is
dead” because for Nietzsche, God never existed as a name
standing for something real, that is for Life. God was
never Life, consequently existence, but an ideal which
doesn’t represent anything, meaning a no-thing.

As
impressive as it is, through its metaphorical power, the
formula “God is dead” is incorrect, on my view, even in
Nietzsche’s philosophical framework, because for
Nietzsche’s God is not equated with Life. I can agree
with him that a God who is not Life is a fiction and the
history of metaphysics, trying to pinpoint God, in a
conceptual structure, which necessarily is limited,
killed unwillingly the life of God. Looking to the human
nature and the world, Nietzsche didn’t see anywhere the
presence of something who could be equated with God,
because good and moral beauty, are only ideals, not
intrinsic characteristics of man and his world. In the
same time the refusal to recognize the openness of
humanity towards ideals, which are in a sense foreign to
its nature, means the enclose-ness of the
Will-unto-Power in itself in a way which cast the human
nature in futility refusing it any contemplation of
itself and any possibility of detachment from its own
biological determinations. The negation of the dynamic
of plurality and diversity of forces which compete in an
indeterminate way it is not to be replaced by ideals
which don’t have any foundation in man but this internal
movement should be assumed. In the same time if
Nietzsche is right, trying to bring his ideas further,
the ideals could have an origin not only in an
unthought-of dynamic but also in a rejection of what was
thought but found out unacceptable. The moral judgement
is rejected as the supreme instance of rationality but
in fact it could be understood not only as the product
of an arbitrary and unconnected intellectualism but also
as an expression of the need for survival so as the need
of Life onto gaining its power. “Do not kill” it is not
only a moral desiderate but manly an expression of Life
protecting itself so it should be thought as internal to
the Will-unto-Power and not only to the idea of good,
which is characterized as a fictitious value. “Good” was
not created as a figment of imagination but as the
result of the need of Life for more protection and
power. The concepts of good, identity or causation can
be seen as ideas and ideals without reference to Life or
as the manifestation of diverse possibilities of Life
itself and that depending on which degree of
intelligibility is attached to the complexity of the
movements in question. The separation between the moral
values and the dynamic of Life itself, based on the
Platonic construction, looks rather artificial and
doesn’t answer to a more basic question: what is the
reason, which determined the mental opposition between
the sensible world and the ideas? Is it only an
unawareness of the complexity and multiplicity of the
dynamic of Life or more than that?

For
Nietzsche, nevertheless, the death of God needed to be
radical a point from where any recognition it is
impossible. Opposite to Hegel, who sees the death of God
as a sacrifice of his abstraction in order to re-take a
new position more effective and concrete, for Nietzsche
humanity killed God and did that without understanding
the consequences of such an act. In the dialectical way
of comprehending, so specific for the history of
metaphysics and particularly for Hegel, it is impossible
to understand the dimensions of this deed. The ideal of
God was the protector of humanity from the depths of
nihilism and by killing these ideal humans destroyed the
possibility of ideals as such. The question of why this
happened can only partially be posed and this partial
answer is super-man, who is an inherent movement in man.
The nihilism is the very essence of man, that from which
he can’t escape and the super-man is an event of
futurity in man in the very profound sense that, in
Deleuze conception, it is revealed in him the
annihilation of the question of Being itself. With other
words the question of Being is never reduced to the
history of metaphysics because it was unthought-of by
this very history. In the same time this history of
metaphysics in thinking being has missed the question of
Being living open a space for that which is not
thought-of and accordingly it is not at all to be found
in this place.

In
order to appreciate the Heidegger’s
Nietzsche-interpretation is important to start with the
essay entitled, “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is dead.”
Heidegger appreciated that for Nietzsche God is the God
of Christianity, but interpreted in a non-Christian way.
God determines, as a symbol, the ideas and ideals, the
earthly world from above and from outside. According
with the Platonic tradition the real world is that of
the ideas, represented by God, and the changeable world
of sensible entities is only an apparent one. The world
of sensible realities, taken in the broad sense of Kant,
is the “physical world” and consequently the world of
ideas or ideals is one of metaphysics, which is of the
“supra-physics” and for Nietzsche the latter was
represented by God. To say that God is dead equal to
saying that the metaphysical world is dead in the sense
that it doesn’t offer any more the foundation for a new
hope. The metaphysics as such it comes to mean nothing
at all and this nothingness is in fact nihilism.
According to Heidegger, the formula “God is dead” is
nothing more nothing less than the realization of a real
occurrence, a striking expression of a fact.

To come
back to the original text of Heidegger essay;
“Nietzsche’s Word: God is dead” several observations
must be made. Heidegger considered that Nietzsche
represented a stage of Western metaphysics that is, as
it seems, its final stage. No essential possibilities
have remained for metaphysics, after Nietzsche. The
super-sensory is a product of the sensory and by denying
it, as its antithesis, the sensory negate its own
essence. The dismissal of the super-sensory effaced
also the distinction between sensory and non-sensory. In
each phase of the history of metaphysics the destiny of
Being tailored its way over the beings “in abrupt epochs
of truth;[11]
As Heidegger puts it, for Nietzsche, thinking means: to
represent beings as beings. For Heidegger all
metaphysical thinking is
[12]onto-logy
or is nothing at all.[13]

In his
essay Heidegger states it from the preparatory stage:

“The
following commentary, in its intention and consequence,
keeps to the area of the one experience out of which
Being and Time is thought. This thinking has been
concerned constantly with one occurrence: that in the
history of western thinking, right from the beginning,
beings have been thought in regard to Being, but the
truth of Being has remained unthought. Indeed, not only
has the truth of Being been denied to thinking as a
possible experience, but Western thinking itself
(precisely in the form of metaphysics) has specifically,
though unknowingly, masked the occurrence of this
denial.”

I took
the liberty to reproduce this passage because it
expresses very well the starting point of Heidegger
thinking both in Being and Time and in his whole work.
In the above named essay Heidegger take also the
opportunity to observe that Nietzsche sees himself as a
thinker under the sign of nihilism. In any case
Heidegger prevents the Nietzsche’s reader to take the
word of Nietzsche: “God is dead” too hastily but to
focus on analyzing it as it was intended. As a young man
Nietzsche was familiar to the idea of death of God. He
declared in “The Birth of Tragedy” (1870) “I believe in
the ancient German saying: all gods must die.” Heidegger
maintains that between Hegel, who said that the “feeling
on which the religion of the modern age rests – the
feeling that God Himself is dead…,” and Nietzsche
conception “there is an essential connection that
conceals itself in the essence of all metaphysics.”[14]

Heidegger made it clear that in speaking about the dead
of God Nietzsche, referred to the Christian God but in
the same time to the “super-sensory world in general.”[15]
As I said earlier Heidegger point out that for Nietzsche
“God is the name for the realm of ideas and the ideal.”[16]
From Plato and from the Platonic interpretation given by
the latte Greek philosophy and Christian thinking the
sensory world is the physical world and the
super-sensory one the metaphysical world. As Heidegger
shows; “God is dead means: the super-sensory world has
no effective power.”[17]
What that means? Was the super-sensible world not
relevant any more?

Nevertheless, critics of Platonism existed before
Nietzsche and one of the most prolific of them was
Aristotle. It is strange to reduce the history of
metaphysics to only one of its roots and to neglect the
others. Even in the history of metaphysics there were
thinkers who embraced more the Aristotle’s conception
than the Plato’s one, or a combination of both of them,
without granting any reality at all to the
super-sensible world. Few people and perhaps not even
Plato took seriously the possibility of the existence,
in a factual way, of the world of Ideas but this
allegory was used more as a theoretical tool, in order
to demonstrate the connection between the universal
concepts and the real things. What I want to say is that
the concepts are and remain an indispensable tool for
thinking even if we are pure realists or materialists
and that, independent of any religiosity. In some
Eastern civilizations this rapport between conceptuality
and reality still remains without any relation to a God.
Nietzsche connected the two but this connection doesn’t
look like a “necessary” link. Not being a necessity it
is more like a demonstration by analogy with many flows
due to the analogy itself. The problem is that Plato’s
philosophy was assimilated by Christianity and the realm
of Ideas, just another myth, as was the myth of the
cave, was transformed in a seemingly reality. In this
way a pure didactic and schematic learning methodology,
served by Plato, become the explanation for the nature
of God. Something very human was sealed with divine
authority by the Church.

Nietzsche understood his own philosophy as the
countermovement against metaphysics and mainly against
Platonism. But Heidegger observed that Nietzsche
necessarily remains trapped particularly because any
“anti” – is bound to the essence of what is challenging.
The Nietzsche’ movement against metaphysics remained
“embroiled” in it without any way out. More over, it was
blind to the real essence of metaphysics and to what
really happens in it. If God is dead, in the sense that
the super-sensory power lost any influence the
conclusion would be that is nothing left for man to
orient him. In this way nihilism is standing at the
door.

Nihilism is a historical movement and not just a view or
doctrine held by anyone. It is the fundamental movement
of the history of the West. In order to understand the
relation between nihilism and Christianity it must be
said that for Nietzsche Christianity is the historical,
secular-political phenomenon of the Church and its claim
to power within the formation of Western humanity and
its modern culture.[18]
It is not about the Christian life as recommended by the
gospels but about the imposition of power and authority
by a religious institution. A confrontation with
Christianity doesn’t mean an absolute negation of the
life of Christianity but a denial of the official,
institutionalized, Christian values pressed by the
religious organization on society. This is important
because one can understand that, in fact, Nietzsche
didn’t analyze the internal dynamic of the life which is
conveyed by the Christian principles, but the impact of
constructed values pressed on society by political and
religious reasons. It is probably possible for one to be
a person of faith and in the same time to agree with
Nietzsche, to a point, about the fact that the kind of
Christianity promoted by the official organizations of
the Church had failed somehow to represent the life of
God. The reason can be the separation, initiated by
Plato in the metaphysical tradition, between the
supra-sensible world of ideas, considered the real one,
and the disgust thrown upon the sensory world, which in
a sense was appreciated as being inferior because was
not real, than not truth.

This
discrimination of the sensible manifestations of life
had an effect on reality and reduced God to a mere
abstraction, in this way obstructing the life or the
Being of the possible Being, who was only named by the
concept. The history of metaphysic or the theology never
tried to find out what is the Being of God, what is the
relation between Being and God or what we name when we
utter the word God. Is there any reality, or life or
dynamic behind that word? Is God an entity or not? If it
is not an entity what is He? Reducing God to a set of
concepts or ideals Christianity, with the help of the
Greek philosophy, killed Him.

As
Heidegger noticed “In ‘God is dead’ the name ‘God,’
thought essentially, stands for the super-sensory world
of ideals that contains the goal that exists beyond the
earthly life for this life; they determine it thus from
above and so in certain respects from without.”[19]
If theology was forced, as Heidegger maintained, to the
role of explaining the beings in their entirety it
surely avoided the question of the Being of beings. The
place of Church dissolved authority was taken by the
authority of conscience and of the reason. The
withdrawal from the world into the super-sensory was
replaced by the historical progress and instead of the
promises of an eternal bliss in the hereafter many
people, not all, have chosen an earthly happiness. God
is not any more the only Creator because humankind
entered itself more and more in a process of creating
its own world. What will happen when the hierarchical
order of beings, adopted from the Hellenistic-Judaic
world will be replaced with something else? What else
can be put in place?

Nihilism was not determined by unbelief, in the sense of
apostasy, it is not a subjective attitude but is an
effect of the misunderstandings due to metaphysics,
concerning the question of Being and the relationship
with beings; “rather, it is always only a consequence of
nihilism: for it could be that Christianity itself
represents a consequence and a form of nihilism.”[20]
Because the essential ground of nihilism resides in
metaphysics itself there is a danger for effects to be
taken as causes. Heidegger considers that any analyzes
of the social or spiritual life will be fruitless until
the place for the essence of man and the experiencing of
the truth of being will be clarified.

Nietzsche short answer for the question: “what does
nihilism mean?” is “That the highest values devalue
themselves.”[21]
Which are they? It is usually understood that they are
truth, goodness and beauty. But the highest values
really loose their importance, as Heidegger puts it,
when one understands that the ideal world can’t be
realized within the real world.

Heidegger maintains that for Nietzsche this type of
nihilism it is not an event amongst others but it is a
trend of the history of metaphysics starting with Plato.
Metaphysics is an interpretation of beings in their
being-ness. Nietzsche noticed that the main stream of
interpretation of beings, in his time, is based on
values that are without value so it is value-less. He
maintained that there is not any correspondence between
the world of ideals and supreme values, represented by
God and the real human experience. [22]
Starting with the inspiration granted by the work of
Schopenhauer, with his “pessimism of weakness” and
“pessimism of strength” Nietzsche himself practice a
negative and a positive nihilism. The first one focused
on a de-valuation of all traditional values and on this
basis a rejection of them and the second one is based on
possible new interpretation of beings in their Being
with the aim of overcoming this crisis. Nevertheless the
devaluation can be overcome only by re-evaluation and
not just by a replacing of some values with others.
First of all a new system of values was needed and the
source of them cannot be any more the lifeless
supra-sensible world but the Life itself. Even if
Nietzsche reclaims the field of metaphysics on the basis
of a Life-force principle, his nihilism remains as such
in spite of its highest status. Heidegger argues that it
fails in its claims because it remains metaphysics. He
sees all metaphysics as nihilism. This kind of nihilism
is based on the fact that the revelation of Being as
truth means nothing as far as the Being of that Being
itself does not have any meaning. In fact, the truth of
beings counts as Being, because the truth of Being is
not understood. This is the reason why metaphysics is
nihilism, which is a forgetfulness of Being.
[23]

The
only way to overcome such nihilism is to pass beyond
metaphysics and to approach the Being-process itself.
But Nietzsche cannot do that because he remains within
the borders of metaphysics. If God of the Christian
faith left the place empty other lesser gods rushed
themselves to occupy it; doctrines of world happiness,
socialism or Wagner’s music, “everywhere that ‘dogmatic
Christianity’ has gone bankrupt.” This is an incomplete
nihilism and doesn’t sort out the difficulty, because it
is impossible to escape nihilism without revaluing the
former values.[24]
The incomplete nihilism errs by the fact that is placing
the new values in the place of the old ones, which is
the domain of super-sensory and a complete nihilism will
wipe out entirely this area, of the supra-sensible. It
is a new re-evaluation of values, which calls for
another region. Instead of the world of super-sensory
the re-evaluation of all values should be based on life.
The philosophy of Nietzsche is one of the values and
with him the notion of value became more popular in the
modern philosophy and culture. Heidegger noted that the
theories of value became a substitute for metaphysics.
But for him value, if it is something, ought to have its
essence in Being.

Beside
what I already remarked about what values are, as seen
by Nietzsche, I should add only another few things. The
essence of the value is that it is a viewpoint, which is
always posited by a seeing and for a seeing. Valid value
is something which is posited as what matters. To see is
“to see with the mind” or to represent. There is a
“nisus,” which is an urge for the beings to make an
appearance, and this is a part of the Being of beings.
This “nisus” determines the occurrence of each and every
thing. This “nisus” like-essence is the one, which
determines for itself a certain posture of presentation,
a point of sight. This point of sight gives the
necessary perspectives, which have to be followed. This
point of sight is value.[25]

Will to
Power, becoming, life and being for Nietzsche stands for
the same meaning. Nietzsche posits the becoming, the
Will to Power as that which establishes the points of
view, mentioned above. The Will to Power is the ground
for the dispensation of value and for the possibility of
value-estimation.[26]
For Heidegger, the Nietzsche’s attempt for overcoming
metaphysics is just a self-blinding because is doing the
same thing done by metaphysics. In Nietzsche’s
interpretation nihilism derives from the rule of values
and from the possibility to posit values but this
possibility is based on the Will to Power. Heidegger
postulated that Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism and his
statement “God is dead” can only be understood correctly
through the essence of the Will to Power.[27]

Haw
would Heidegger answering to the observation made by me
that Christianity is life because is love? He would have
said that no longer does the super-sensory world inspire
and sustain life. That world is dead. The love, which
was announced for that world is not an effective
principle and doesn’t explain what takes place now.[28]
The effective reality of everything real is considered
by Heidegger to be thought and also it is the
super-sensory ground of the super-sensory world, which
becomes unreal. “This is the metaphysical sense of the
metaphysically thought word “God is dead.”[29]
Heidegger could agree with my opinion that the question
of the reality of God was never thought seriously, in a
metaphysical way when he said: “God ceases to be a
living God if in our continuing attempts to master the
real we fail to take his reality seriously beforehand
and question it…”[30]
Neither man or the super-man can’t take the place of
God.

Heidegger asks: “What is going on with being in the age
when mastery begins to be exercised by the unconditional
will to power? Being has become value.”[31]
This is a high status for Being and a proof of esteem.
Nevertheless, by becoming value, Being is transformed in
a mere condition of the Will to Power itself and in this
fashion is robed by its very essence. In such
metaphysics the experience of Being itself, the
exposition to the truth of Being, is obliterated. This
thought was for Heidegger an indication that, matter of
fact, was never in actuality a thinking about Being as
Being. The Western thinking has always thought about
beings using only the word being as a unity of beings
but without real preoccupation about it. As Heidegger
noticed “Being is not permitted as Being.” Nietzsche
raised the value-thinking to a principle in the attempt
to overcome nihilism. As already said, values does not
allow Being be Being and for this reason a theory of
value, in Nietzsche’s view, it is by no means a
overcoming of nihilism but a completion of it. The kind
of disguising practiced by Nietzsche, toward Being, is
more sophisticated because Being is seen as being value,
than being valuable, but in fact the obtrusion of the
Being of Being is there. Elevating God to the highest
value is in fact a reduction of God, who is considered
real, because his Being is not thought. In other words,
being considered a value, God comes only secondary to
Being, the latest, as an example, with Nietzsche, is the
Will to Power. For Heidegger this thinking “is absolute
blasphemy when it is mixed into the theology of the
faith.” Is man ever been capable of killing God?
Nietzsche himself was surprised by this thought. He used
three metaphorical images: the drink of the sea, the
wipe of the entire horizon away, to unchain this earth
from the sun. Losing their super-sensory horizon beings
have become objectified and were assimilated into the
immanence of subjectivity. Because the horizon of light
is no more there what remain are only the viewpoints and
the presentation of values by the Will to Power. It is
what Heidegger said from the beginning of his essay when
he said that loosing the super-sensory realm the sensory
world lost its essence. The three metaphors are used by
Nietzsche, in Heidegger’s expression, in order to
explain what is meant by the formula “God was killed” by
man. “This killing means the elimination, through man
of the super-sensory world that has its Being in
itself.” It is a modification in the Being of beings.
The possibility of Man transformed itself also because
he “eliminates beings in the sense of beings in
themselves.” In other words beings are not more
connected directly with the world of Ideas, which gave
them their essence, their Being, through participation,
but they become objects through the human uprising to
subjectivity.

Heidegger observed that the cause of the neglect of
being as Being is not Nietzsche’s philosophy of values,
because even before Nietzsche, or before Plato
metaphysics didn’t any serious step in that direction.
“The history of Being begins – necessarily begins – with
the forgotten-ness of Being.” The essence of nihilism is
found in history and Nietzsche came to know some
characteristics of nihilism but interpreted them
nihilistically and never identified the essence of it.
Because Being doesn’t come to the light of its own
essence the truth of Being remains forgotten. Being
remains unthought-of and that is because it removes
itself into its truth.

Nietzsche maintained that humans don’t desire truth for
the truth sake. One of his aphorisms says: “The ‘will to
truth’ develops itself in the service of the ‘will to
power’.” [32]
In his aphorisms Nietzsche question the value of truth.
For him truth is separated from good and beautiful and
depicted in dark colours as something which doesn’t
serve humans survival. In any case humanity doesn’t aim
for the truth but only for power. Even if one considers
that the possession of truth is a mean to acquire power,
as far as anyone still respect the value of truth, this
thesis doesn’t question Nietzsche’s ideas about truth.
Nietzsche doesn’t deny the ‘will to truth’ but this kind
of will is entirely subordinated to the ‘will to power’.
In the end what people seek is not the truth but a
falsification. As he explained, in his aphorisms, the
task of the ‘will to truth’ is “to assist a certain kind
of untruth to victory and endurance, to make a coherent
mass of falsifications into the basis for the
preservation of a particular kind of living creature.”[33]
Man wants to create a stable picture of the world in
view of realizing a platform for his actions. This is a
perspective, which is never truth but is subordinated to
the ‘will to power.’ These are ‘perspectival
falsifications,’ necessary for human survival. Nietzsche
says: “synthetic judgements a priory should not be
possible at all: we have no right to them, in our mouths
they are nothing but false judgements. But belief in
their truth is, of course, necessary as foreground
belief and ocular evidence belonging to the perspective
optics of life.[34]
For Nietzsche perspectives come about on the basis of
who one is and are interpretations helping people to
face the world. For Nietzsche each perspective is a
false truth. One has to have o look on what Nietzsche
understands by “the truth.” For him is may be more
accurate to affirm that there is not truth.

“There
are many kind of eyes. Even the sphinx has eyes – and
consequently there are many kinds of “truth,” and
consequently there is no truth.”

Henceforth, my dear philosophers let us be on guard
against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that
posited a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing
subject’; let us guard against the snares of such
contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason,’ ‘absolute
spirituality,’ ‘knowledge in itself’: these always
demand that we should think of an eye that is completely
unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction,
in which the active and interpreting forces, through
which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are
supposed to be lacking; …There is only a perspective
seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’;…But to eliminate
the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect,
supposing we were capable of this – what would that mean
but to castrate the intellect?”[35]

In
Nietzsche’s optic there could not be an absolute truth
because there are many individual perspectives, which
determine each of them, a specific truth. None is the
possessor of truth in an objectified way, and everyone
can have a perspective about the world, which
necessarily falsifies the reality. The individual
perspectives are brought about by the whole body and are
not promoted by a desire to know the truth, for its own
sake, but are caused by the Will-unto-Power. We know
things in a way, which is useful for our survival and
accumulation of power and are blind to those, which can
endanger these possibilities. So to speak we are blind
to everything, which tries to shows us things, which are
undermining our natural drive towards more power. Some
truth can be destructive for us and instinctively we
avoid it.

The
traditional understanding of truth is based on the idea
of correspondence between our knowledge about reality
and the sensible world itself. Nietzsche contradicts
this conception and maintains that we can’t achieve
knowledge of the truth as correspondence to the world.[36]
He obviously rejects the Plato’s super-sensible realm of
Ideas and the Kantian thing-in-themselves as the proper
domain of reality, as the true world. Even the
designation “apparent world” doesn’t make any sense for
to be an “apparent world,” firstly it must be a real
world, which it is not the case. For Nietzsche a thing
is the sum of its effects.

“The
properties of a thing are effects on other ‘things;’ if
one removes other ‘things,’ then a thing has no
properties, i.e., there is no ‘thing-in-itself.’

The
‘thing-in-itself’ non sensical. If I remove all the
relationships, all the ‘properties,’ all the
‘activities’ of a thing, the thing does not remain over;
because thingness has only been invented by us owing to
the requirements of logic, thus with the aim of
defining, communication (to bind together the
multiplicity of relationships, properties, activities).

‘Things
that have a constitution in themselves’ – a dogmatic
idea with which one must break absolutely.”[37]

A thing
is a power-quantum or a power-constellation and it
doesn’t have individuality in itself. In the same time
the universe can’t be thought as one organism and for
this reason can’t be understood as having in itself the
totality of all perspectives. Accordingly, an organism
needs exteriority, from which comes its nutrients, and
because that can’t contain “the truth” in itself. For
Nietzsche truth and God are related in the sense that
the first one, if it were to be a fact, it should be the
perspective of God, but there isn’t such a possibility
of a truth poses by some-thing. “The death of God” and
the impossibility of truth are the symptoms of the same
developments. The “truth” should be the attribute of an
organism only if this one gathers all possible
perspectives of all times within itself. In fact, the
“truth” is replaced with the “truths” belonging to the
organisms which hold them. All this kind of truths is
false perspectives, a way of interpreting the world, a
basis for the action of various organisms. The “truth”
could only be reached, as a reflection of a unity and
constancy which in reality never happens.

After
these few observations about the way in which the
Nietzsche’s metaphysics will allow us to speak about
truth I should try to present, as much as this
opportunity permits, about Heidegger’s approach of
truth. It must be said from the beginning that for
Heidegger the problem of truth is inseparably connected
with what is meant by “Being.” Before to go any further
it is important to speak a little bit about few
fundamental things for Heidegger thought as presented in
his essay: “On the Essence of Truth.” In C.1. section 2
Heidegger approach the question: how is an “agreement”
between a proposition, based on a representation, and
the thing which is “represented” possible? While he
presents his view he explains two philosophical terms:
“Vorstellen” (representation; letting something stand in
front of oneself) and “Gegenstand” (object; a thing
standing opposite to oneself). More precisely
“representation” means: “letting a thing stand opposite
to oneself as an object.”

To
represent a thing in the mind consists in letting that
thing to “come” to that particular perception. As
Heidegger maintained, the thing “traverses” an
“overtness” towards oneself. This kind of “overtness”
belongs to a “realm of relations” of its own. This
“openness” makes possible all human activities and all
his dealings with other things or with his fellow-men.[38]
A craftsman has, from the beginning, the object, which
he or she wants to realize in his or her mind. This kind
of “openness” was as an event happening in the early
history of mankind when the “realm of beings” opened to
man whereas it had been closed before. This “openness”
is considered to be the permanent and indispensable
condition for all human civilization and specifically
for all propositional truth. Only if man is together
with things, in “overtness” is an approximation between
a thing and a statement possible at all.[39]

To have
a better understanding of what this “overtness” means
for Heidegger two other things should be accounted for,
which is “truth” as an uncovering of what is and
“ex-sistence” as an “ex-position” into such an
“un-covering.” Heidegger sustained the need of
re-interpretation of truth in the sense of the original
Greek concept of it. In English there are two words,
which refer to this deployment of meaning namely
discovery and revelation. Both terms are an expression
or continuation of what is expressed in the Greek word
and has a positive meaning; between themselves,
discovery and revelation, there are nuances, important
for our discussion. “Dis-covery” means to separate and
take off a cover from a thing underneath but in
“re-velation” the “cover” is understood to be more
closely connected with the thing which is covered. In”
re-velation” the veil is looked at more as a obscuring
of sight and more transparent than a cover.
“Re-velations” happens usually at once and are not the
outcome of a work or process similar to the one
happening in science. There are not other words in
English able to cover the whole possibilities for the
understanding of truth. The Greek word used by Aristotle
in the “Nicomachean Etics” Book VI showed five ways in
which the soul is in truth.[40]
The term used by Aristotle means an “uncovering” of the
things as they are but not in the way science or
religion is using it. For Heidegger all things were
shrouded in a initial mystery, a veil, which covered
them, and all discoveries that are made are carried on
against this background. This background should be
remembered because it is inseparably linked to the
“truth.” Only when the first tinker called latter
philosopher set in motion the question: “what is all
about?” the truth was experienced for the first time as
a lifting up of the veil, which covered this “all.”[41]
Consequently, the first stage was the process of
questioning itself and, in order for the “veil” to be
lifted, the right question have to be asked. This was
the most important moment in the development of human
race. Notably, this question was a philosophical one:
“what is all that is?” because philosophy occupies
itself with the understanding of reality in its most
general aspects. But to ask this question is to question
in direction of Being, which is not an entity but is
responsible for all that is. For Heidegger philosophy is
the cornerstone of the human civilization and finally
the power of thought, which poses the question of Being,
is the essence of Being itself. To question continuously
in direction of Being is in itself the most important
determination of it.

Heidegger re-introduced the concept of “Existence” but
gave it a new understanding. It is not any more just
mere existence in the sense of a thing which can be
found in a certain place at a certain moment, nor
“Existence” with the meaning attributed by Kierkegaard
and encountered in the modern thinking: “the ethical
endeavour of man, based upon his bodily and inner
constitution, on behalf of his self.” For Heidegger
“Ex-sistence” means an “ex-position” of the thinker.
[42]
He or she found him or her outside of the realm of
concealment. Only from this position he or she can ask
the question pertaining to the all embracing reality.
The “ex-position” is a sort of transcendence from the
every-day-ness of human beings but not an extraction
from it. It is more like an “ecstasy,” but with no
mystical connotations. All this happens inside Dasein
which is the place for this process. This kind of
“ex-position” into the uncovered propels the thinker to
reflect to what is inside all beings in the world and
what determines them to be as they are. To be concerned
with things such as they are is in fact the “truth” and
that is more than information gained by knowledge either
scientific or scholarly. Only when man took and treat
the things as what they are the world open up to him.
Truth, which is the uncovering of “what is,” means first
and foremost to live things-to-be what they are and not
the accord between a proposition and a thing or a fact.
Truth is related to the whole “overtness,” which was
created when for the first time man asked: “what is all
that is?” That line of questioning created the only
possibility for the understanding of the beings in their
Being and in their truth. In order to be able to grasp
the Being of beings they have to-be-let to be what they
are and to “come” to man in the “opening” created by the
questioning in direction of Being. Man experiences
himself also as a being open to himself, in being there,
in the midst of other beings. This openness of man in
direction of Being of beings is an opening of himself to
himself, which becomes a possibility only when man
realizes the full significance of being there in the
midst of other beings. Man is not Da-sein by his nature
but he enters into it trough his “ex-sistence.”[43]

In my
view I see a connection between Nietzsche and Heidegger
in the sense that both of them understand truth based on
the web of relations, which condition the possibility of
any action and knowledge. For Heidegger as for Nietzsche
truth is not the approximation between sensible reality
and concepts but the openness towards the reality as it
is. The Nietzsche’s falsifying perspectives are
determined by the particularity of any individual
experience. For Heidegger, being there, in the world, in
the every-day-ness of human life means also the
“letting-be” of things, which, similar to Nietzsche’s
ideas, excludes the imposition of arbitrary theoretical
concepts upon reality. If for Nietzsche there is not
acceptable truth this is because the question of Being
still remains obliterated in his metaphysics. He tries
to find a foundation for entities, which in a way
explain how the beings work and become but not what they
are. Nietzsche didn’t pose the fundamental question:
“what is all that is?” but he tried to answer to another
question: “how, all that it is, is related within
itself, deploys itself and become what it is?” For
Nietzsche and for Heidegger the reality can be
understood by a dynamic never fulfilled in itself never
achieved as such but always supplementing itself through
an excess feed from itself. The Will-unto-Power and the
thinking Thought are not to be understood in a
teleological manner; there is not finality or
predetermined end towards which they push themselves.
Nevertheless, in a different way both Nietzsche and
Heidegger rejects the understanding of the traditional
metaphysics about truth.

Heidegger, in his essay mentioned above, stated that
truth is interpreted as the uncovering of the things
that are within the “whole.” What is the “whole”? This
implies the multitude of relationships of human Dasein
with the things existing in the world. It also contains
the plurality of connections of the things one with the
others and a possible hierarchy among beings. The
relationship of human Dasein with beings doesn’t cover
the entire complexity of these connections. For
Heidegger if there is truth at all, is necessarily
related to the whole. Truth can’t be without the whole
or outside it.[44]
Famously, Hegel said that “the true is the whole.” This
is a conviction, which can be traced in the conceptions
of many great philosophers in the European tradition.
But what is the whole for Nietzsche? For him there is
not absolute, God’s eye and a standpoint from which one
can survey everything that is.

Heidegger constantly underlined the idea that truth is
the exposition of human life to the “overtness” of the
entities that surrounds him “in the whole.” The
relationships of the human Dasein to the things that are
“in the whole” are tuned by a certain “mood”, which
somehow reveals the things “within the whole” to man.
This “mood” is a basic but important link of man with
all other beings and creates a tuning atmosphere, a kind
of harmony given by the drive towards the truth. This
“within the whole” is what is tuning everything.

Heidegger understood phenomenology in a way that
departed from the Huserlian way of analyses of
consciousness. For him phenomenologies become a method
of philosophy understood as ontology. All the
assertions of ontology are considered by him to be a
priory and have to do with Being rather than with
beings. Before the encounter with beings, Being must be
understood. Heidegger had a unique conception about the
way in which time functions as the source of a priory.[45]

The
basic problem of ontology is the meaning of Being in
general. Being shows its own directions, it has its own
structure and it itself distinguished from beings. In
order to understand beings and have a suitable
comportment towards them we have, in our Being, to
encounter them in their Being. Ontology is a
pre-understanding of beings in their Being. According
with “Basic Problems of Phenomenology” Being determines
itself in four ways. 1) It differentiates itself from
beings and that give the ontological difference.[46]
2) Being, as distinguished from all beings, articulates
into a what and a way-of-Being. 3) There are different
ways or modes of Being. 4) There is a mystery of the
connection between Being and truth. This short summary
in connection with Being suffice just to see the radical
difference between Nietzsche’s way of seeing metaphysics
and Heidegger approach to it.

Is
Heidegger the end of a path in philosophy, which
culminates with the understanding of Being? While
acknowledging the importance of aletheia for
radicalizing the notion of truth, Derrida establishes
some distance from Heidegger. Derrida argues that
Heidegger’s negation of metaphysics does not succeed to
overcome or destroy metaphysics, remain bound to the
ontological structure and vocabulary of metaphysics. He
asserts that non-metaphysics or a reversal of
metaphysics remains a form of metaphysics and there is
not in fact any difference with metaphysics. Derrida
argues that a simple negation of metaphysics remains a
repetition of it. For Derrida, the origin of metaphysics
is located in difference. Derrida said that both for
Husserl and Heidegger, their thought is enabled by the
fact that difference grounds the possibility of
structurality and structure. Derrida shows how Husserl
and Heidegger placed the origin of metaphysics in a
non-origin but they failed to recognize difference as
the meta-condition that enables the very structure of
their philosophy. For Derrida truth is constituted by
difference, the aporia between the representational and
the post-representational and is implicated in both.[47]
To grasp the truth implicates the understanding of its
impossibility. Truth is the space between the
transcendental and the empirical.

Derrida
substitutes the anteriority of a trace for the “presence
of logos” but he argued that he doesn’t replace
Heidegger’s ontology of Being with an ontology of
ground. He is more interested in the tracing the
conditions of Heidegger ontology. Derrida is not
critical of this repetition of metaphysics but he argues
that this kind of thought doesn’t realize what Heidegger
intentioned to do, which was to overcome metaphysics.